Michelle Beadle created a firestorm with her decision to no longer watch football

Jake Rili
Saturday Down South
Originally posted August 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

“I believe that the sport of football has set itself up to be in a position where it shows itself in the bigger picture to not really care about women,” Beadle said on the show. “As a woman I feel like a person who has been marginalized.

“And every single one of these stories that comes out, every single time, pushes me further and further away. I realize they don’t care, but for me it’s opened up my weekends. I appreciate you for giving that to me. I don’t care anymore. I’ve lost the ability to be surprised. You got three games. You could’ve been fired. They could’ve gotten away with not having to pay you a single dime. You survived it, and not only did you survive it, but you didn’t have the grace enough to at least look over the statement you were handed seven seconds before and pretend that you meant a single word in it. The entire thing is a disgrace.”

The info is here.

Ohio State places winning above morality by failing to fire Urban Meyer

Ryan Pawloski
The Daily Nebraskan
Originally published August 29, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

These off-field scandals were no secret back when Meyer was at Florida, and Ohio State showed that it was willing to look past them when it hired him a year after he left Gainesville.

It is evident that Ohio State kept Meyer because he wins, but the question still remains: Why did Ohio State fire Tressel after the 2011 tattoo scandal, but keep Meyer after knowing he kept a domestic abuser on his staff and lied about not knowing?

Tressel had a successful tenure as the Ohio State head coach from 2001-10 as he went 106-22 — 94-22 after NCAA sanctions — and won five Big Ten titles and one national title in 2002. Many would think that Ohio State would have kept Tressel just like it did with Meyer because he won, too.

The answer is simple. Meyer has been better for the Buckeyes than Tressel was. Tressel was one of the top coaches in the country at Columbus and any program would have taken him if he was on the market, but Meyer was better.

Meyer retired from coaching in 2010 because of health and family reasons. About six months later, Tressel was forced out by Ohio State because of NCAA violations. An explanation for Tressel’s termination was that Meyer was on the market and Ohio State knew it had a chance to get the coach it always wanted.

The info is here.

President Trump brings mafia ethics to the GOP

Paul Waldman
The Washington Post
Originally posted on August 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

But Trump is big on people keeping their mouths shut. As head of the Trump Organization, as a candidate and as president, he has forced underlings to sign nondisclosure agreements forbidding them from revealing what saw while in his employ. In many cases, those agreements included non-disparagement clauses in which the signer had to pledge never to criticize Trump or his family for as long as they lived. The mafia had “omerta,” and Trump has the NDA.

So how will Republicans react to Trump’s diatribe against flipping criminals? Will they try to ignore it or decide he has a point?

The thing about a cult of personality is that its character depends on the personality in question. Republicans sometimes mocked Democrats for worshiping Barack Obama, and you might argue that some of his supporters got a bit starry-eyed at times, particularly in 2008. But Obama never asked them to suddenly offer a full-throated defense of something morally abhorrent simply because the president thought it might be good for him. Whether you agreed with his policy choices, Obama was a man of great personal integrity who ran an administration free of any significant scandal. No Obama supporter ever said, “Oh my god, I never thought he’d ask me to justify that.”

Trump does, on an almost daily basis. But if his supporters are having any doubts, they might want to consider that this won’t be the last time he asks them to abandon their principles.

The info is here.

Government Ethics In The Trump Administration

Scott Simon
Host, Weekend Edition, NPR
Originally posted August 11, 2018

President Trump appointed what's considered the richest Cabinet in U.S. history, and reportedly, more than half of the president's Cabinet, current and former, have been the subject of ethics allegations. There's HUD Secretary Carson's pricey dining table, VA Secretary Shulkin's seats at Wimbledon, Scott Pruitt's housing sublet from a lobbyist, Interior Secretary Zinke's charter planes, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin taking a government plane to see the solar eclipse, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross might need his own category. Forbes magazine reports on many people who have accused him of outright theft, saying - Forbes magazine - quote, "if even half of the accusations are legitimate, the current United States secretary of commerce could rank among the biggest grifters in American history."

The interview is here.

Religion does not determine your morality

Jim Davies
The Conversation
Originally posted July 24, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Experimental evidence suggests that people’s opinion of what God thinks is right and wrong tracks what they believe is right and wrong, not the other way around.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues surveyed religious believers about their moral beliefs and the moral beliefs of God. Not surprisingly, what people thought was right and wrong matched up pretty well with what they felt God’s morality was like.

Then Epley and his fellow researchers attempted to manipulate their participants’ moral beliefs with persuasive essays. If convinced, their moral opinion should then be different from God’s, right?

Wrong. When respondents were asked again what God thought, people reported that God agreed with their new opinion!

Therefore, people didn’t come to believe that God is wrong, they just updated their opinion on what God thinks.

When you change someone’s moral beliefs, you also change their opinion on what God thinks. Yet most surveyed still clung to the illusion that they got their moral compass from what they think God believes is right and wrong.

The information is here.

Implicit Bias in Patient Care: An Endemic Blight on Quality Care

JoAnn Grif Alspach
Critical Care Nurse
August 2018 vol. 38 no. 4 12-16

Here is an excerpt:

How Implicit Bias Is Manifested

A systematic review by Hall and colleagues revealed that implicit bias is manifested in 4 key areas: patient-provider interactions, treatment decisions, treatment adherence, and patient health outcomes. How a physician communicates, including verbal cues, body language, and nonverbal behavior (physical proximity, frequency of eye contact) may manifest subconscious bias.7,10 Several investigators found evidence that providers interact more effectively with white than nonwhite patients. Bias may affect the nature and extent of diagnostic assessments and the range and scope of therapies considered. Nonwhite patients receive fewer cardiovascular interventions and kidney transplants. One meta-analysis found that 20 of 25 assumption method studies demonstrated bias either in the diagnosis, treatment recommendations, number of questions asked, or tests ordered. Women are 3 times less likely than men to receive knee arthroplasty despite comparable indications. Bias can detrimentally affect whether patients seek or return for care, follow treatment protocols, and, perhaps cumulatively, can influence outcomes of care. Numerous research studies offer evidence that implicit bias is associated with higher complication rates, greater morbidity, and higher patient mortality.

The info is here.

Designing a Roadmap to Ethical AI in Government

Joshua Entsminger, Mark Esposito, Terence Tse and Danny Goh
www.thersa.org
Originally posted July 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

When a decision was made using AI, we may not know whether or not the data was faulty; regardless, there will come a time when someone appeals a decision made by, or influenced by, AI-driven insights. People have the right to be informed that a significant decision concerning their lives was carried out with the help of an AI. Governments will need a better record of what companies and institutions use AI for making significant decisions to enforce this policy.

When specifically assessing a decision-making process of concern, the first step should be to determine whether or not the data set represents what the organisation wanted the AI to understand and make decisions about.

However, data sets, particularly easily available data sets, cover a limited range of situations, and inevitably, most AI will be confronted with situations they have not encountered before – the ethical issue is the framework by which decisions occur, and good data cannot secure that kind of ethical behavior by itself.

The blog post is here.

The Genetics (and Ethics) of Making Humans Fit for Mars

Jason Pontin
www.wired.com
Originally published August 7, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

In the first stage of his plan, Mason is combining human cells with a gene called Dsup, unique to the indestructible tardigrade, that suppresses DNA breaks from radiation. Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space; perhaps their genes might make us more fit for space, too. His lab has also created an artificial construct of the gene p53, involved in preventing cancer, which it hopes later to insert into a human cell. Elephants have many copies of p53 and seldom die from cancer; adding copies of p53 to human genomes might protect us from space radiation. Mason’s less speculative research includes editing Deionococcus radiodurans, sometimes called “Conan the bacterium,” a polyextremophile that can survive cold, dehydration, acid, and very high levels of radiation, the last by rewriting its damaged chromosomes. Mason wants the microbe to live as flora on our skin or in our guts, or on the surfaces of spaceships, protecting us from the deadly rays of space. “The microbiome is an extraordinarily plastic thing,” he says.

Some researchers have proposed more science-fictional projects. Harris Wang of Columbia wants to coax human kidney cells to synthesize the nine amino acids our bodies cannot make. A human cell able to synthesize all the organic compounds needed for health would require around 250 new genes, but if our tissues were made of such cells, astronauts could thrive by drinking just sugar water, a liberating adaptation: Missions wouldn’t have to lug bulky food or send it on ahead. Other scientists have suggested photosynthetic spacefarers, or editing the personalities of the space corps, so that they fearlessly longed for the high frontier because it was their true terminus.

The info is here.

Has Genetic Privacy Been Strained By Trump's Recent ACA Moves?

Michelle Andrews
www.npr.org
Originally posted July 11, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

However, if you develop symptoms of a disease or are diagnosed with a medical condition, GINA no longer protects you. That's where the Affordable Care Act steps in. It prohibits health plans from turning people down or charging them more because they have a pre-existing condition.

"GINA did something good, and the ACA was the next important step," said Sonia Mateu Suter, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in genetics and the law.

The Trump administration put those additional ACA protections in doubt last month when it said it won't defend that part of the law, which is being challenged in a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of 20 states.

The administration said that since the penalty for not having health insurance has been eliminated starting in 2019, the provisions that guarantee coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and prohibit insurers from charging them higher premiums should be struck down as well.

The protections are a priority with many voters. In a June poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, two-thirds of voters said that continuing protections for people with pre-existing conditions will be either the single most important factor or very important in determining their vote in this fall's elections.

The information is here.